The Marriage of Roman Soldiers (13 BC-AD 235): Law and Family in the Imperial Army

CHAPTER SIX
#x201c;MARRIAGE” PATTERNS:
THE SOLDIERS’ UNIONS IN THE INSCRIPTIONS

1. Introduction

This chapter analyzes a survey of the soldiers’ family relationships,
as recorded in Latin funerary inscriptions from the city of Rome,
Italy, the Danubian provinces, and North Africa. As recently estimated, some 250,000 Latin epitaphs are known from the ancient
world.1 The Latin epitaph is a highly specific cultural artifact; at its
most extensive, it records the name of the deceased, his or her social
status (Roman citizen, senator, soldier, freedperson, artisan), origin,
career, age at death, and relationship to the commemorator (the
individual who set up the tombstone). The epitaphs’ biases (they
record the wealthier, more urban, and Romanized strata of ancient
society) have been emphasized in recent years, with skepticism about
the use of epitaphs as a source of social history.2 It is now agreed
that epitaphs cannot be used to reconstruct positivistic demographic
data, such as the average age at death in various regions or the size
of populations (such as the number of freedpersons in Rome or the
number of Roman citizens in the provinces).3 Nevertheless, the epitaphs do reveal the sentiments and social personae and aspirations
of the deceased and the commemorators. Commemoration patterns
suggest the epigraphic population’s family structures and their most
valued social roles and social aspirations.4 Commemoration patterns
can even be used to estimate age at marriage. Latin epitaphs pro-

1 Shaw (1991), 67.

2 Parkin (1992), 19 warns that “The material is so plagued with misleading biases
and impossible demographic trends that the use of tombstone inscriptions, however
selective, is unjustified and potentially fallacious.”

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